Magic night, etc.

Last night Shannon was in town so we hit magic night. Stetson was good, the rest, eh. That's a valid banagrams word right there according to Jeremy. I thought the best trcik was Stetson's dice prediction trick where someone takes his large die and places it with a certain number facing upwards and then covers it. Stetson then predicts it, 4 times in a row. I google searched it but came up dry.

Lunch today is late season pokeweed shoots, polenta with grape leaves, topped with chickweed. All from the Fens yesterday evening. There was a whole section I'd never explored: lots of geese, lots of untended land, and two gigantic trunked hawthorns.

Monday night was Shannon's first night in town and we all burnt our candles as it were that night. We sat outside and boozed a bit at the Legal Seafood bar and became curious about this party we could see on the second floor of the Charles hotel. It looked lame (a lot of that Harvard fashion of coral-colored shorts and Izod shirts and such - awful - where are the fashion police these days) but it also looked like a lot of free booze. And that it was. We got kicked out several times, but made off with some wine and a nice plant. And as for the dumpsters, well, Upper Crust provided well for us. Although there were some complaints that the buffalo chicken pizza wasn't that great. Who complains about fresh pizza tossed away? Apparently my friends do. Not I.

I really don't understand why the magicians at magic night DO THE SAME GD TRICKS EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I KNOW they know lots of tricks, do these people have no boredom gene. I just don't get it. Hopefully I'll get some comments to this post that shed some light on this issue, in Chinese obviously.

Clear Flour Bakery

There is a neat little bakery tucked away off of Comm Ave in Brookline called Clear Flour. Next to it there is a huge apartment building. The amount of fresh bread in their little dumpster last night at 12:10 AM could have fed that whole building. I carried two bags home, left about 6 there. Please come to my house and have some bread, it's in the firdge and the freezer. And you might have a Baer sighting. My landlord, Baer, is lording over the pipes and trying to stop a drip in my bathroom. The place is crubmling. He stil calls the bathroom above mine "Ingo's bathroom". Ingo lived there two years ago. He hasn't rented it out again yet.

30th anniversary celebration of food not bombs this Sunday.

Braintree back roads to Braintree printing

I just a trip to Braintree Printing (T then bicycle). Passed a huge patch of milkweed right outside the T station. It's a little late, they are getting pretty tall, but I'm giving them a lengthy boil right now, see if that softens them up. I decided to go for a 250 run of my book, which brings them in at around $4.50 a pop. Which isn't too bad.

Everything in the suburbs is weird. One highlight though, and not typical 'burbs, was a stack of books for free outside someone's apartment. A bunch of poetry (a guy like John updike publishes a book of poems, and you can't really tell at the outset if they are going to be good or they are published because he also brought us rabbits running and witches of eastwick). I started reading Murder in the Catherdral by T.S. Eliot on the train back. OK so far.

Late season milkweed shoot verdict in: it's too late. They are pretty stringy. I will eat them of course, but I'm glad I'm not serving them to anyone.

poke mountain

That cool pic? Hipstermatic, or something like that, an iphone app that gives all sorts of retro-looking picture options. Thanks sarah b and rob for alerting us to the app.

Milkweed and pokeweed hauls on the vineyard last week. Over by the famed watercress patch I found a construction site with a mountain of pokeweed in perfect stage for harvesting. I'd love to get to the bottom of "minimum amount of time to cook the stuff" since every book is different, but this is a risky thing to uncover. For now, I'll just continue to cook the heck out of it and serve up mushy greens.

The vineyard week was great, and I'm happy to report that my friends all put up with a large amount of foraged eating.

Also, my book -- Urban Foraging -- is finally available harvard.com's book site.

Brian tells me black locust flowers are out in NYC. Gotta go exploring...

x Weed

Japanese knotweed has ended its prime time (pickling worked, wild fermenting is stinking up my kitchen, and pan seared knotweed tops -- or "knotweed calamari" is good) and milkweed shoots are out and pokeweed is just poking up. Book hard copy #2 is out and in the hands of 5 new recruited editor friends. MIT press interested in carrying it, as well as Rodney's and Darwins and maybe TeaLux. I'll measure success in 10s, not 1000s :)

High Rise bakery provided me with 2 beautiful and huge whole wheat sour dough loaves the other day, which will keep me honest for a couple weeks.

Vineyard next week!

Garlic mustard weed - a crunchy invasive

Garlic mustard weed scapes a good size for picking right now. Thanks to Sam Thayer's new book, Nature's Garden, I learned that this is the best part of the plant. And sure enough -- crunchy and light and a bit of a symphony in the mouth - lots of tastes happening. Great chopped up into a linden salad.

Again: preserving Japanese knotweed

It seems like overnight the knotweed has gone from little red stumps to two foot stalks, so I gathered a bunch from the Charles river (that patch just north of Harvard sq is coming along well) last night and set to preserving it. Four different ways. Hot Hot pickle, where I boiled it in vinegar and water briefly, added some spices and salt, including hot pepper flakes, and jarred it. Cold garlic pickles. COld sweet pickles (a touch of maple syrup in the water/vinegar solution, no spices, except a little salt too). Finally, the most adventurous, wild fermentation. Chopped it in mini food processor (wanted to shave it but couldn't get that going) and added some salt, into an open ball jar, and now fermenting - hopefully - on my counter.

It would probably save me time if I just flew to Japan and asked the locals there what they do with it. They'd probably tell me they prefer sushi.

Perfect Linden salad time, and getting some burdock and wild carrots too, and still plenty of evening primrose.

Just finished J.D. Salinger's "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters". That writing really puts you smack into NYC 1950's white intellectual culture. Interesting that he headed off to the country so completely.

From the dumpsters: bagels, foccacia, 6 eggs, and some hair coloring dye that I didn't take.